Princeton University Press
Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More - New Edition
Key Metrics
- Derek Bok
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691136189
- 9.1 X 6.2 X 1.07 inches
- 1.35 pounds
- Education > Educational Policy & Reform
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, former Harvard President Derek Bok examines how much progress college students actually make toward widely accepted goals of undergraduate education. His conclusions are sobering. Although most students make gains in many important respects, they improve much less than they should in such important areas as writing, critical thinking, quantitative skills, and moral reasoning. Large majorities of college seniors do not feel that they have made substantial progress in speaking a foreign language, acquiring cultural and aesthetic interests, or learning what they need to know to become active and informed citizens. Overall, despite their vastly increased resources, more powerful technology, and hundreds of new courses, colleges cannot be confident that students are learning more than they did fifty years ago.
Looking further, Bok finds that many important college courses are left to the least experienced teachers and that most professors continue to teach in ways that have proven to be less effective than other available methods. In reviewing their educational programs, however, faculties typically ignore this evidence. Instead, they spend most of their time discussing what courses to require, although the lasting impact of college will almost certainly depend much more on how the courses are taught.
In his final chapter, Bok describes the changes that faculties and academic leaders can make to help students accomplish more. Without ignoring the contributions that America's colleges have made, Bok delivers a powerful critique--one that educators will ignore at their peril.
Author Bio
Derek Bok is the 300th Anniversary University Research Professor at Harvard University. He served as the twenty-fifth president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991, and as interim president from 2006 to 2007. His many books include The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges, Higher Education in America, Our Underachieving Colleges, and The Shape of the River (all Princeton).
Derek Curtis Bok (born March 22, 1930) is an American lawyer and educator, and the acting president of Harvard University. He was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Stanford University (B.A. 1951), Harvard Law School (LL.B. 1954), and George Washington University (A.M. 1958). He taught at Harvard from 1958, where he served as dean of the law school (1968-1971) and then as university president (1971-1991). Bok currently serves as the Faculty Chair at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard and continues to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He reassumed the presidency of the university on an interim basis after Larry Summers’ resignation took effect on July 1, 2006. He expects to have the job for about a year.
His wife, the sociologist and philosopher Sissela Bok, née Myrdal (daughter of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and the politician and diplomat Alva Myrdal, both Nobel laureates), is also affiliated with Harvard, where she received her doctorate in 1970. His daughter, Hilary Bok, is a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Source: Princeton University Press and wikipedia.org
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